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Objects in mirror...

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Nearly a year in the making, kernel.org has announced four new machines coming online in November of 2010. This is quite the change in infrastructure, covering two new "heavy lifting machines" and two new backend machines to round out kernel.org's infrastructure of 12 boxes running worldwide.

As many people know, particularly if you are reading this blog, kernel.org runs the infrastructure that the Linux Kernel community uses to develop and maintain a core piece of the operating system. That said, kernel.org provides a lot more services than just a couple of git repositories and a place to download kernel releases. It hosts the Android source, provides Internet bootable utilities and installers, one of the fastest and most comprehensive mirrors of Linux distros, a plethora of wikis, and the Linux Kernel bugzilla. It also hosts and maintains a variety of other websites that are central to the development of the Linux Kernel or to the greater Linux ecosystem.

The four new machines that have fully come online in November were donated by Google with a generous discount from HP, and they are some impressive pieces of hardware to say the least!

Mirrors1 and Mirrors2, the two machines in the United States that service mirrors.kernel.org, fully replace machines that had been in service for 5 years. The new machines live up to their names of the “heavy lifting machines” (both because they move the most data for kernel.org, but lifting 6-10u worth of equipment is actually quite heavy)! Specs for those are:

Each setup uses up 6u of space now, saving us about 4u per-setup over our old equipment, and they give us a lot more storage space and a lot more RAM to be able to handle mirroring for so many people.

We also upgraded the master backend machine for kernel.org, and took our still-awesome previous master backend and turned it into a live spare should anything ever happen to the primary machine. We added a second dynamic web infrastructure box as well, to help host the wikis and things like bugzilla, giving us an active fail over as well as a load balanced system.

With these two additional boxes coming online, kernel.org reached a milestone as we now have a redundant machine for everything currently in our inventory. We've been quite successful with the redundancy we have with our frontend facing machines, and now we have that same level of redundancy available to us on our backend machines.

Our thanks go out to Google and HP for helping make this happen, with special thanks going toChris DiBona of Google for making this happen, Shawn Pearce of Google for putting up with with me through all of this, and Bdale Garbee of HP for helping us get the equipment we need and being such a great friend of kernel.org for so many years!

To quote our saying on mirrors.kernel.org, “Objects in mirrors may be closer than they appear!”